Ben Holmes
Forum Replies Created
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Shayne
The question is what’s more important to you – space or safety?
With 2 drives, sure the RAID 0 option is faster, but for DV/HDV work, it’s not strictly necessary – it’ll just up your ability to deal with more ‘streams’ in real-time (somewhat of a dubious benefit in day to day editing IMHO) and will improve your read/write times.
The mirrored solution RAID 1 gives you complete backup of all of your data, with those nice drive trays in the MacPro allowing you to swap out and rebuild if anything goes wrong. You could always buy two 500Gb Sata’s and get the same amount of storage as RAID 0 above. It’s a pretty failsafe solution. Even a 250Gb Raid would give you 20 hours + of HDV storage.
You need 3 or more drives for RAID 5 – although for my mind it’s a great compromise in terms of the trade off and performances losses you get from a single redundant drive. It also seems to me to be sensible in terms of the rate of failure of drives these days – pretty low really. So one out of 4 ain’t a bad deal to me. I can’t comment on speed advantages of 5 over 3 – but 5 is commonly used in video arrays, and is more commonly used full stop.
Finally – does Apple’s own disc utility DO RAID 5 or 3? It’s possible you may need some extra software, but I’m sure someone can clarify that for me. I genuinely don’t think that the speed differences between these arrays will affect your workflow. I’m not saying they’re not there – of course the read/write speeds on a RAID 0 will be twice as quick, but you only need to read/write DV streams, and render times will be more effected my the processor speed than disk access speeds.
Of course, the nice thing is that you can chop and change as and when the circumstances alter – so no harm in trying all of them, and figuring out what matter to you.
Ben
Editec Broadcast Editing Ltd
EVS & FCP specialists for live OB operations.“The Supercar Run” now available for international distribution from http://www.electricsky.com
See you at IBC – we’re there with our FCP/replay truck…
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The table at the top of this page suggests NOT:
https://www.anandtech.com/mac/showdoc.aspx?i=2816&p=16
Anandtech took one of the Dual Core Xeon processors out of a Quad Xeon, and got exactly the same render time in FCP for this particular test – that’s the first two lines of the top table. Who knows if it applies to ALL FCP renders?
There has been considerable speculation (mostly based on Apple’s own benchmarks on 5.2.1 and what certain people have been told) that the next release may see some speed increases on a quad architecture. Personally, I find selling a machine based on beta software that only the hardware manufacturer has access to a little shady.
What’s certain is that over time, and the release of Leopard in Jan, we WILL see FCP harness as much of that sweet sweet quad core goodness as it can – eventually. Plus it’s going to be a performance gain on INTEL machines ONLY from now on in all likelihood. Still not interested in a Quad Xeon yet myself, I’m waiting for a real-world gain.
Ben
Editec Broadcast Editing Ltd
EVS & FCP specialists for live OB operations.“The Supercar Run” now available for international distribution from http://www.electricsky.com
See you at IBC – we’re there with our FCP/replay truck…
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I wasn’t going to say that. Well…
If you’re exporting a movie to play in QT player, just change the video properties in QTP for the file, setting the dimensions as Pete said for PAL.
If you want to use it back in FCP, you need to open it in the viewer and Apple+9 it and tick the anamorphic box in the item properties. Then, when it’s put in a timeline it’ll be the correct aspect. I don’t think (and I’m sure I’ll be corrected if I’m wrong) that QT files have an ‘anamorphic’ flag embedded in them, so you have to do this every time you reimport. Be nice if it wasn’t so.
Ben
PS – Pete – are you going to IBC? Be there Sat/Sun/Mon in our crazy little truck…
Editec Broadcast Editing Ltd
EVS & FCP specialists for live OB operations.“The Supercar Run” now available for international distribution from http://www.electricsky.com
See you at IBC – we’re there with our FCP/replay truck…
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I suppose the difference here is that you are importing a good quality S-Video (component Y-C) signal via an uncompressed codec, much in the same way that the component HD outputs on an HDV deck, or the HD-SDI outs on a Canon HDV Cam are superior. Better to let the deck process the video and colourspace than the computer.
Note that we’re not talking about mixing material here, just working in DV. Is this still a better option? Does this say something about the processing in FCP? You’d think dropping the DV stream ‘digitally’ into an uncompressed timeline would be better, but is this a question of processing?
Interesting.
Ben
Editec Broadcast Editing Ltd
EVS & FCP specialists for live OB operations.“The Supercar Run” now available for international distribution from http://www.electricsky.com
See you at IBC – we’re there with our FCP/replay truck…
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Alfonso
What Walter said was: “No it doesn’t go to the Mac Drive first. If you set the External drive as the Capture drive, then it goes directly to the External drive. Footage will only go to the Mac drive first if you set the Mac as your Capture Scratch.”
This is correct. It doesn’t go anywhere near the system drive in this instance. That’s all he said.
My point is even simpler: There is no bottleneck in DV capture using FW this way – even FW400 has a far wider bus bandwidth than DV requires – more than a factor of ten. The FW passthrough on the drive can easily cope with DV streams at 3.6Mb/s passing each way. That is NOT, nor ever has been, the reason why people can’t capture using this method – it’s simply an incompatability with the camera, which MAY be the case here. Firewire was designed with consistantly high video bitrates in mind, as opposed to the data ‘bursts’ that USB2 uses, which is what makes a FW400 bus more than adequate for the AJA IO to pass on 10-bit uncompressed SDI. Almost everything else in this setup, including the firewire drive (wherever it is connected) is a speed bottleneck compared to the FW bus.
Everything you suggest about the theoretical advantages of a second firewire bus are correct – it’s quicker on paper. But there’s so much headroom in a DV system, you’ll never see the difference. It may even be the only solution in this case, but since I think we scared the questioner off a long time ago, I guess we’ll never know 😉
Ben
Editec Broadcast Editing Ltd
EVS & FCP specialists for live OB operations.“The Supercar Run” now available for international distribution from http://www.electricsky.com
See you at IBC – we’re there with our FCP/replay truck…
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Don’t know any sites, but what’s the sport? You could pick some key objects from the game (say for example the ball) and use those to created a blurred and animated background in Motion – try the replicator for some nice effects. Just a little relevence to what you’re covering gives a nice impression in a game, so just keep the objects very subtle (low opacity and blurred) and you could make a nice, animated ‘strap’/’background box’ that you could just layer text onto in FCP. Hey – don’t even use motion if you don’t like it – animate in FCP then crop and resize to your box.
A few simple 2d cutouts of a ball/pitch markings/flags/trophys should do it, with some nice random shapes to break it up.
Sounds like fun! What’s the sport? We’re just making up gfx for the Ryder Cup, but we have to use the broadcaster’s house style! Boring….
Ben
Editec Broadcast Editing Ltd
EVS & FCP specialists for live OB operations.“The Supercar Run” now available for international distribution from http://www.electricsky.com
See you at IBC – we’re there with our FCP/replay truck…
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Yup. Gotta send mine in. Still, my PB never blew up, and I now get a shiny new battery 😉
Ben
Editec Broadcast Editing Ltd
EVS & FCP specialists for live OB operations.“The Supercar Run” now available for international distribution from http://www.electricsky.com
See you at IBC – we’re there with our FCP/replay truck…
-
The Apple + R option only renders the clips whose status (indicated by the colour of the line above the video track in the timeline) matches the types with a tick by them in the ‘render’ section of the sequence tab. If you tick, for example the green (preview or full) options in this list, then the render will happen every time you press Apple+R. Same for the material with the orange bar that plays back via RT at a lower rez/framerate.
There’s also a seperate list for render all. In this way, FCP allows you specifiy what level of rendering you need, so for example, if will ignore material that will run in real time in some manner, but render clips that won’t play at all. Neat feature, so play with it and it may increase your productivity!
Ben
Editec Broadcast Editing Ltd
EVS & FCP specialists for live OB operations.Producer/Director “The Supercar Run” now available for international distribution from http://www.electricsky.com
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You know (it’s raining outside by the way), that section in the manual doesn’t explain this type of connection, which I think it used to. Anyone know if this is the case? Seems odd, as it’s the way many people have worked in the field for many years. I supppose that Apple feels that some compatability issues = don’t use it.
I think that’s wrong, as the alternative for laptop users is the use the internal drive, or use a cardbus. As I said, not every one has access to a cardbus (Macbook and PB 12″ users for example) so it seems incomplete to me.
Apologies for the ‘read the manual’ comment . It’s still incorrect to say it shouldn’t work, because it usually does, and most queries on the Cow about this are solved by checking the setup.
Ben
Editec Broadcast Editing Ltd
EVS & FCP specialists for live OB operations.Producer/Director “The Supercar Run” now available for international distribution from http://www.electricsky.com
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Sorry. Felt I needed to clarify this.
[Adolfo Rozenfeld] “Not to mention the unnecesary comment about reading the manual, since I think I will easily prove he’s wrong and making that kind of comment while being wrong….. :)”
The manual DOES go so far as to say that SOME cameras will not work connected through a drive. But we just don’t know what equipment is being used here. In the majority of cases it does work. The advice in the manual is, I have to admit, incomplete, as it makes no distinction between single firewire drives and raided firewire arrays. Express Card FW interfaces are very new products, so the incompatability may be there. I’m sure the info in the manual about FW drives has been changed over the years, as it now spends so long extolling the virtues of SATA drives… (wonder why?!)
[Adolfo Rozenfeld] “The scratch disk setting only states that you want to use that hard drive, but doesn’t solve the bottleneck issue in which the hard drive has to act as a bridge between the video device and the CPU, given the lack of another FW port.”
And where exactly do you imagine the bottleneck is when DV has a bitrate of around 5Mb/s and firewire supports many times more than that? The problems with some cameras has nothing to do with this, just the firewire implementation.
Come to that, how do you imagine people like me (and there may be more than one) who have a Powerbook 12″ without an expresscard or PCMIA slot have been editing DV for the last few years? Every deck and camera I have used (mostly Sony and Panasonic) have worked.
Once again, if he tells us what camera and drive he is using to capture what format we could help. That’s help.
Ben
Editec Broadcast Editing Ltd
EVS & FCP specialists for live OB operations.Producer/Director “The Supercar Run” now available for international distribution from http://www.electricsky.com